


Black Poppy

by Aloice



Series: A Tower of Three Boxes [1]
Category: NieR: Automata (Video Game)
Genre: 9S POV, Character Study, F/M, Gen, NaNo 2017 tag, first chapter is T and second chapter is M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-18
Updated: 2017-11-19
Packaged: 2019-02-04 01:56:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12760770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aloice/pseuds/Aloice
Summary: Or: the Meat Box character study that got out of hand.Or: how 9S perceives himself, YoRHa, and the machine war.Order is a lie. Purity is a lie. The black poppy is the black heart of war.Now with gorgeous art byThirtyOne.





	1. Bloom

**Author's Note:**

> All the thanks to AK (the cutest) and Dreamfang for looking over the end of this and helping me decide to cut this in half.  
> Also working with JPN voice headcanons (the severity of 2B's voice in the Amusement Park).

_There’s no sense to anything that the machines do._

Spoken naturally, caringly – she cannot be distracted, there could be flying types raining violet bullets from air vents and sniping spots while she watched the flight of the birds – the sentence falls like water under gravity. He looks up from the scene of the little stubby with its oil bucket, smiles in blissful hope and naivety. Imagine if it could really have a brother. Imagine if the machines could really one day understand such precious and complex concepts such as family –

The curl of his upper lip, the careless thought of a dreaming child:

_Then we might get a chance to end this endless war, maybe?_

\- -

_So, um, 2B… that machine had some pretty weird things to say, huh? It’s almost like it had actual emotion –_

“The machines don’t have feelings. You said that yourself, 9S.” 2B’s interruption is curt. Severe, even. He’s suddenly aware of the fundamental construction differences between the two of them, 2B’s double swords ( _double the combat power_ ) lingering just inches away from his own body parts. She hasn’t moved – hasn’t gotten any closer – yet there’s a menacing, congealing element in the air, an acute and undeniable sense of danger. The opera singer’s prayers and dreams die on his tongue. Something is screaming deep within his own unconscious.

_Abandoned theatre house._

_Faded crimson walls and clusters of debris._

_Scattered android and machine bodies, unrecognizable, unsalvageable –_

He short-circuits himself out, utterly disturbed at how any part of him would ever envision 2B hurting him over his feelings about a machine, and continues forward, letting the whole thing fall dismembered from existence.

\- -

_2B, we can’t trust anything the machines say!_

Her broken and twisted ankles and wirings, still fresh on his mind: 2B crawling to him on top of a dead Marx as the goliaths rose in silent unison from the depths, ready to execute in one sweep if not for the heat and passion of their desperation. Her face as it twisted in agony, the waves of her heart rippling through the pattern of her black box – he wouldn’t ever forget that he’s not in allied territory, five dozen waving white flags or no.

“I understand that you see us as the enemy, but…”

The machine’s voice is soft, older, and resigned. They listen. The weather is fair, the supply ships drawing graceful pale arcs in the sky as they ascend to the moon. Pascal looks upon his charge with more fondness than the Commander would ever spare, and he feels a tinge of jealousy over their freedom.

_Machines can choose to stop fighting and simply be. What about us? Is there a life open to us beyond service and sacrifice?_

Pascal hands them a fuel filter. Some android is going to place that thing in their body. Things are getting more fantastical every single day.

\- -

The Forest King: absurd, yet full of selfless love for his subjects.

Grun: an abandoned child, ceaselessly calling for its mother from the abyss.

The machine: the progeny that never should have been born, the parricide that does not seek to be forgiven, the wanderer, the stranger.

Adam and Eve…

He missteps, seeking and taking on too much. The same mistake. Adam constrains and taunts him, a figure of pure white in a world of pure white. Order is a lie. Purity is a lie. Android black is a lie. The humanoid machine forces words and desires like black poppy seeds down his throat, drives them to take roots and grow, and _by humanity_ , he gags.

_Perhaps you have a will after all. Perhaps you have desires._

_Now you see, boy! The true meaning of life… is hatred!_

_A vile hatred slumbers in the depths of your heart._

_You’re thinking of how much you want to **** 2B, aren’t you?_

The poppy seeds flower and flare, withdrawal and acute desire in a fever. The monochrome stakes pin him to the invisible wall. He struggles: negative feedback creates but a wall of relentless echo. The world turns and folds in upon itself. Numbers, _lines_ –

_II I! I-I! I-I-I-I-I-I-I!_

He only has howls for words.

\- -

_My brother was everything to me… My life was contained in our moments…_

_Let’s go somewhere quiet… together…_

The maze of the hacking space grows wider and wilder, chess blocks entangled in mist and thorns. Red is creeping into the periphery of his vision, telltale signs of corruption and personality loss creating ripples through the data streams. If losing himself means that he will save her, today, someday –

Eve looks up earnestly from his end of the table, a shining wish written in too-young eyes.

_Stop mirroring me! Stop saying everything I’ve ever wanted to say! Stop suggesting that we are the same!_

_EVE!_

\- -

He dies quietly this time, filled with a strange kind of grace. He imagines 2B gazing down at his form, holding his crumpled body, maybe even softly calling out his name.

_If I’m dead, would it be alright to call me Nines?_

He drifts. He has expected disintegration – disappearance – even a taste of heaven or hell – yet he finds himself falling down a winding road in hacking space, a lonely heart chasing multiplex fragments. The machine network almost sees him as one of their own. The strewn machine heads and biped lifeforms light up at his touch. It’s almost as if…

_As if I’m home._

They’ve offered a reprieve; he wraps his arms gingerly around it without truly understanding why or how. There is, obviously, the technical aspect of things – leaving data where he shouldn’t have been and regenerating one’s self over multiple bodies – yet his soul shivers, still a small child stripped naked by dying, and all he wants is her touch.

She stands tall above his not-hands, a mantra. He feels the pain within him drain away, another kind of belief rushing in to take its place. It’s going to be okay. Perhaps it will finally be okay.

Despite everything…

\- -

“Remember your pain! The pain of having your homeland stolen! Here and now, we will put an end to this goddamn war! Glory… to mankind!”

2B convulses violently from the virus as the sound of death and laughter rise in a choir around him. The EMP machines… he can’t fight… can’t hack… can’t evade. How did it come down to this? The idea had been for a full-out war since Adam and Eve had been defeated, yet nearly all the squadrons they were assigned to assist had been destroyed…

_2B!_

The black-clad YoRHa units resonate in morbid mirth as they draw their swords. Those weapons still freshly tainted with machine grease and parts, gifts from Command not too different from the weapons used by 2B or himself… this is wrong, this is all wrong, they –

_2B, I need to hack into you and fry your identification circuit!_

Black bodies fall all around them, the blood stench almost unbearable in the air. YoRHa artifacts are strewn all over the earth, power ups and name tags and dead android heads. It had been one thing when he had watched 2B take down the betrayers – but this, this helplessness in the face of ever increasing odds, this fear struggling alone on an Earth where there’s nothing left to mourn, this loss of faith –

_We need to die before we can live._

The black boxes ignite and burst into the big bang, and they are tossed back towards the origin and event horizon.

\- -

WE aRe youR bElOvEd mAchiNe LifeFoRms

We’vE Had A gReat dEal of fUn wAtChInG yOu sqUirM

BuT I’M AfrAiD ThE enD hAs CoMe foR tHiS ouTposT

AH ha! AaAaAh Ha ha ha!

She slices through steel frames and viscera, leaving them incapacitated and whimpering on the ground. He hacks, mercilessly frying away the minds and souls of those who had maintained his flight units and analyzed his scanner data, stepping hard on bleeding defender faces as they run, searching despairingly for an opening –

_The Bunker. The Bunker is lost. YoRHa is lost. Humanity is lost. There’s only –_

The shrill laughter does not stop. They fall on familiar faces, friends and comrades, their own operators. The bunker burns, collapsing pillars and support frames, tossing entire warehouses of broken android bodies into an icy void space. The commander’s face, just as inscrutable as when she told him of humanity’s extinction a few days prior, with just as much forbidden compassion and love in wanting them to live –

2B screams.

He screams with her.

\- -

The world falls out of orbit with her, and it’s not going to come back.

\- -

The black poppy is the black heart of war.


	2. Pod

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I played through Automata on JPN, and Natsuki Hanae's voice has always haunted me in its animalistic screams since I... grew up watching countless films of China getting invaded (and absolutely obliterated, at least in the beginning) by Japan. I've been conditioned to feel personally violated by 9S' JPN despair sounds but that only makes me want to write it more.
> 
> War is a terrible drug, kids. Don't do it. Changed the fic rating from T to M because... yeah. This chapter.
> 
> A gold star for anyone who catches the DW reference, two gold stars for anyone who catches the pod pun with the title, and all the thanks to Axiom for being a huge sweetheart through all of this. The first "archive" is from the Satyricon by Gaius Petronius, and serves as the epigraph of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. *sweats* One of these days my writing will be good enough to let me get away with referencing those kinds of things.

\- -

He used to whisper into the dark, clutching curiosity and hope like a lifeline through the fogged breath of air made too heavy by smoking machine fire: _hello_?

\- -

_Shoot it out. There’s nothing here but a cold-blooded war._

\- -

.

\- -

_Where’s 2B?_

“You know that better than anyone, no?”

\- -

**[Archive: Ancient Human Poetry Slip]**

_I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her: “Sibyl, what do you want?”_

_she answered: “I want to die.”_

\- -

.

\- -

The resistance member, dark and hooded and sitting around a gathering of pale wood and paler ghosts: “have you seen these folks, perchance?”

 _They’re not YoRHa… so they might be alive, yet, out there, somewhere_. The resistance camp remains standing, and he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t comforted by the steady if melancholic gaze of the older android. He shifts his weight under the sun, squints at the pictures. These are youthful faces, kind and energetic volunteers no doubt looking for some kind of truth or glory. He thinks he’s even before seen one of them around here, a cheerful man with a good shot and mischievous eyes. Where could he be now?

_All they ever wanted was to protect their homes and friends. And to get mowed down and tossed aside?_

There’s something in him that intones _it doesn’t matter, nothing matters anymore, nothing’s ever mattered_ _and_ _there’s no home no friends no mercy or sympathy_ , yet he forces it away, buries it under the pretense of needing to learn how to himself mourn. 2B is gone. If all he wants is a quick and simple death, he can achieve it in a variety of different ways. But what kind of a person would he be, to just throw away this life that 2B has tried so hard to protect?

\- What kind of a person would he be, to not try to at least make the machine world burn before he departs this hateful and meaningless universe?

_Sure. Can you give me an idea where to start?_

\- -

The first man: found face down in the Flooded City, only several feet away from 2B’s downed flight unit. He listens to that final recording of light and feels his black box turn into tears, into ice, into steel.

The second man: found in a pool of his own blood in the amusement park, as a cannibal machine with a balloon looks up at him with a twisted but expectantly reverent grin. He slashes and hacks the fucked thing into pieces with every combust chip he has ever found, and then curses how machines don’t ever bleed nearly as much as those they have slaughtered.

The third man: freshly dead. He tries to poke and hack the body with stimuli and staunching gel but the vitals have already gone silent. Broken things cannot be put back together. It’s time to stop defiling the dead. _“Alert: emergency support request found in transmission records. Sent twelve minutes ago.”_

The fourth man: still breathing, still warm in infrared, lying face down on the sand – what is it? A hitching of breath? A missed beat of the black box? He makes a last-ditch dive for it, he has to be able to save someone, to bring _someone_ back, to not lose _everything_ –

The tanks nearly run him over. Warm blood drips from his arm and chest as 153 screeches for cover and repair. He stops briefly to consider it, letting the warmth splash against the sand and placing his logic virus vaccine program on standby. What’s his recovery stock? Does it matter? The rage that has been seething spreads like a malignant tumor and bursts into a nova.

_The more you try to hide it, the more that darkness grows._

“Scanner units such as yourself are not designed for battle. I’m merely pointing out that you would be a liability on the battlefield.”

_You do not trust anything._

2B’s face, her hoarse, broken voice as she cries out for him in the Copied City and in the center of the City Ruins –

_You have lost hope in everything._

Does anyone realize how much a scanner can make a machine _sit_ and cook themselves insane with the biggest smile ever known to androidkind?

_You’re –_

\- -

“AvEngE tHe paIn of oUr ComRadEs!”

“I haTe aNdRoiDs! HAte thEm!”

“SEize theM! KIlL Them! DEstrOy tHeM alL!”

“BurN thEm to DeaTh! CruSh thEm to DeAtH!”

\- -

_Are you done?_

_Because I am about to start._

\- -

The exhaust system: modify chemical composition to corrosive waste and proceed to feedback loop, directly to central processor.

Logic systems: sever link to machine network. Return modified version of logic virus. Effect: confusion, disorientation, and a sense of rapidly approaching destruction.

Voice recognition and production systems: Return memory and newly infused recordings of machine death sounds. Mimic said death sounds. Increase frequency and amplitude of said death sounds, recursive.

Perception systems: override protection against “pain.” Magnify pain levels. Simulate EMP attack. Simulate friendly fire. Simulate recall of all released bullets in reverse trajectory at 10x speed.

\- Enhance visual and sensory perception as YoRHa unit 9S employs stun and combust chips during overdrive.

\--

_9S to the Machine Network._

_You just killed someone I liked. That is not a safe place to stand._

_Do not force me into a place where I have nothing left to lose, because I am not sure you would want to see what I will become._

\- -

The resistance member has died.

An irrevocable loss.

\- -

_2B…_

_I’m not quite sure what it means to mourn, or even if we have a soul to concern ourselves with…_

The black fabric tingles against his skin like the seamless sky in her eyes. Holding it – wrapping it – feels like holding up her ghost in his emaciated arms. How long has it been since he last lay down to rest? How long has it been since she really disappeared? He’s kept her waiting. Could 2B reproach? Would she feel lonely here, here in all this darkness, praying for light?

The visor… the proof that she existed… the proof that he cared. The only thing he had left of her smile and eyes. That final little piece of his heart that he could only leave with her, to tide her over as he lets her go. He’ll keep his own visor, to keep on living, if only for a little while. When even that falls away, he knows he’ll be ready to join that nothingness of a god…

_But I hope you’re at rest, 2B. Sweet dreams. I’ll be with you before long…_

\- -

“Analysis: writing is an ancient language known as Angelic. It reads ‘meat box’.”

_Is this entire building made of machines, even on the inside?_

“Analysis: many useless parts unrelated to machine lifeform functionality detected. The reason for using said parts is unknown.”

_There’s no meaning to anything that machines do._

This time, the words are uttered with mocking spite.

The world collapses into sepia and static, hounded from above and below by swords and knives. He dispatches them soundly – without even so much as flinching – and the floor soon becomes sticky with fake samurai grease, the useless parts thrown into the multiple floating vents. He counts his kills, trying to skip a step between each one.

Can all of this go any faster?

_Pathetic. These machines can’t even force a last stand._

\- -

Pitch darkness.

Once upon a time a scanner would likely have looked up in wonder and offered a prayer to an ancient human astronomer.

 _That scanner_ , he thinks sadistically, _is dead_.

 _Kill_ , the blackness of Adam’s poppy whispers on the tip of his sword,  _vanquish. Destroy. Kill_. He’s soaked his weapons in that poison, drunk from the well – hatred has served Adam well, but it will serve him better.

_Stick them with the pointy end. Hack through their bones._

He watches the golden hacking particles flicker from his outstretched hands.

It’s over.

It will be over.

\- -

“Pain, so much pain, pain pain pain –”

“I do not – want to die –”

 _Machines can’t feel pain,_ he drawls out cruelly, pulling their cores from their bodies before setting them aflame. They are like trapped fireflies – their radiance lasts only as long as he can stamp them out. One by one, they die to exothermic pod fire or an endothermic circuit crash – and so the sparks fly.

The suicide bombers howl as they reach for him, their lives ending where they first begin. He’s long learned to read them from the shadows of machine torsos and monochrome static – not to say their screams for emphasis, otherwise known as screeches for release.

“Brother… brother…”

_You dare again talk to me about your brother? Do you want to die like that stubby whose brother will never move again, or like that poor excuse of a child named Eve?_

_What do you know? What do you know?_

_Do you even know what it means to live?_

_What right do you have to speak to those whose homes you have invaded, whose lovers you have slain, and whose longed-for families you have erased from existence? Look at this scorched and silenced earth. Look at this complete incineration of your own. You will never be humanity’s children. Now if you’d only –_

A perfect evade into overclock. Eight more machine heads dropping like an octave. In a space suspended by time, both ecstasy and misery rises from seed to reign.

**_\- Shut up, SHUT UP, SHUUUUT UUUUP!!!_ **

\- -

Everything is drowning in a pyroclasm of electricity and stunned discharge.

Somehow, it all hurts less than it should.

 _Did you know_ , he muses as his lips once again curls up into a smile, _there’s a human phrase that says all’s fair in love and war?_

_Oh, come now, don’t run._

_Give 2B back._

_Oh, you can’t?_

_Then prepare to die._

\- -

He reaches the apex; natural light. The commotion in his head dies down gradually, until all he can hear are his own booted steps. Bathed in the sacrifice of all the death up until this point rests a golden orb, resplendent and bright. Perhaps a scanner of the past would have stopped to examine it. Perhaps –

_Weapon, huh?_

He slices across the final few guardian knights like paper, laughing at their feeble resistance. None of this can be helped. Machines can’t understand chivalry or loyalty; they can’t protect _their_ weak and beloved. And then there’s the orb, crying out in fear and static silence –

He tilts his head and widens his eyes.

\- -

The ray is blinding, cathartic. This is war: the child dies.

_You wanted me to know that I’m just the same as you?_

_I’ll show you._

_I’ll give you just the same amount of mercy you’ve given everyone I’ve loved._

_Funny, isn’t it? The horror, the horror. Reap what you sow._

\- -

He approaches it, sword drawn. There’s several entire new logs of unit data in his head and six types of machine parts on Cruel Blood Oath. What of it? The Virtuous element has perished with 2B. A war demands even its children, its scholars and doctors, and its idealists to rise up and taste blood. Slay or be slain – or rather, slay so that the hearts and souls of those slain would have a home to return to.

_You don’t remember 2B._

_Tell me, why should you continue to exist?_

A final line to cross: one knight down, broken, bleeding, defiant. The pretend-victim; the pain poppy’s child, grey and black with gigantic horns and crimson eyes. It spits in his face. It gloats in his hate. It –

“What have we… ever done?”

_Do you even see yourself?_

“Kill me, coward! Kill me! Kill me! Kill me! Kill me!”

_All of this, and you test me for mercy?_

A rise, and a fall.

It comes as easily and as painfully as the first breath of a child crying desperately to live.

\- -

.

\- -

He remains there for a time; kneeling, obscured by pale smoke, as if in an embrace or prayer. All who have seen him know that he prays not for peace; the uniform is stained the wrong color, and he refuses to trade dark visor for bright cruor.

\- -

 _You are more alike than you know_ , whispers the black pod.

\- -

The poppy pod begins crying.

 


End file.
